Not A Dream
[goldhat; fiction]

“I wanted to go over something today that’s not a dream,” I asked the therapist. “If that’s alright.”
“That’s fine,” he said. “What did you have in mind?”
“It’s a memory. From something that happened several years ago.”
“What made you want to talk about this today? Was it related to a dream?”
“No…” I responded. “I was driving by the water, and it made me think of it again, and it’d been long time since the last time I thought about it, so I wanted to try and delve back into it.”
The therapist nodded. “Sure, go ahead then,” he motioned with his pen, before leaning forward in his chair that way he did each one of our sessions.
“This was about six years back. Or seven, I think. It was seven. It was in the city, though the family didn’t live in the place we do now, and our second wasn’t born yet.
I had a friend I first met back in college, and whom I’d stayed on-and-off friendly with since. At first he stayed when we graduated, and I left for the city, but then he moved here a few years later as well, and we reconnected.
Our dynamic was interesting. For most of college, people treated him like the serious one, and I was the goofy one that people liked to joke around with. Somewhere along the line, he started to behave more off-the-cuff, and — I’m not sure when for myself — I calmed down. You could say that’s what led to the family you know about now.
This memory…it happened when my friend was going through a hard time in my life. It was just over a year after he moved to the city, which had seemed like a long time to me, except every time I met with him, my friend expressed how shocked he was at how new everything still felt.
He would say over and over to me, once every time we met, how amazing the crowds here were. He said he always felt like he had to try to count the people when he walked through a crowd, and I’m sure you know just how many crowds there are in this city.
My friend was having trouble with his girlfriend. They were having occasional serious, roof raising arguments, and he confided to me that he always felt as if she were two footsteps from leaving him. Moreover, he said that he himself felt from time to time like she not only didn’t respect him, but that she deeply, considerably despised him.
And then the next week, he would tell me how much he loved her.
In college, my friend also had a serious girlfriend, a different person. They broke up after three years, and my friend started dating this person (i.e. his current girlfriend at the time of this memory), about a year after graduation. And just the same, I remember my friend telling me, in college, that he loved the former girlfriend.”
In the background, I could hear the therapist writing notes, which made me glad for some reason…when he wasn’t writing notes, it was otherwise silent.
“The memory is this: it was a late summer night. I was putting our first to bed, and my wife was asleep in front of the TV. I was at my laptop writing drafts.
My phone rang with a text. I saw that it was from my friend.
I still remember very closely what it said. I look at it again from time to time.”
I closed my eyes and visualized the words:
“‘SOOO SICK of this. Every time!! Every time over and over again!!! no its not you, it never is, its me! me! me! so fucking sick…like, I literally can feel my stomach eating itself. Gonna go to the water. thanks. good bye.’”
I had to wave my arms and modulate my voice to communicate the erraticness of the text. Despite the gravity I’d been telling the story with so far, I couldn’t help smiling, which made the therapist smile as well.
“How did you respond to that?” he asked, gently leading me back into the memory.
“I was concerned. In college, my friend had to spend a room overnight once in psychiatric care. And after we started meeting again in the city, we discussed more than once his mental state, and the possibility of my checking him into treatment. He always demurred, saying he appreciated the oversight, but thought he was doing OK handling it himself.
So I was already fearing the worst now.
My first instinct was to go to him, but I didn’t know where he was, only that he was going ‘to the water.’ I texted him a quick, ‘Where are you?,’ and tried repeatedly calling him, to no luck. If this mood was as I feared, then I knew there would be no response no matter how many times I called.
I wrote down a note to my wife, picked up the car keys, and then ran into my car and started driving. I had nothing to go off of but my friend’s comment about water, so I would drive to his apartment, then search up and down the waterline starting there until I found him. I would drive round and round the city in circles to find him, if I had to.
It was late in the evening, but not yet twilight. The mid-city blocks still had some traffic. I made my way to the park drive, and throttled south down the edge of the city.”
I paused. I looked at my therapist, and prepared what I had to say next carefully.
“Before I had even arrived at my friend’s apartment, I saw him. I was looking frantically out the window of my car at the water, trying to discern whatever I could without losing sight of the road, when a shadowy figure appeared, perched against the background of the water. I knew it was him.”
“That’s quite impressive eyesight,” my therapist commented.
“No,” I responded. “It wasn’t that I could see the qualities of his face, or even his shape. I just knew, when I saw that figure flash by, that I had found him. It was somehow certain in my mind. Like an omen.”
There was a slight uneasy pause — uneasy to me, at least — before I continued.
“I wheeled around, and raced my car to the first place I could find to park it. I dashed out of it and sprinted to where I had seen the figure.
As I approached, I could tell that it was indeed my friend. He stood at the edge of the grass, facing out over the water, inches away from where the pavement fell away into wet, cloudy banks.
I slowed down, out of breath. Finally, I was just five or six feet from my friend. He was still facing away from me. I could see his slick, curly hair, his impressive height, and his narrow but arching shoulders. The water slapped near us, and its noise and spraying smell were thick in the air. I could think of nothing else left to do. I yelled my friend’s name.
When I think of this memory, this scene is the one I continue to legislate in my mind, over and over. Even as I recall it, I’m turning it inside and out, imagining the different ways it happens, both now and then.
In one instance, he turns to me dramatically, his eyes pooling with tears. He tells me he’s scared, rushes to me, hugs me in a quiver.
In another instance, he never turns around, he monologues using words I don’t know, then steps off into the water as casually as a stone.
At times, he yells at me, brimming over with indignant fury.
At times, he’s silent. He doesn’t talk to me, he doesn’t touch me, he leaves and I’m not sure if he ever knows I’m there.”
My therapist probed. “What do you think makes you imagine all these scenarios?”
“I’m not sure myself,” I answered.
“At first I thought I was trying to change something, or to alter the past…but I think my brain does it just because it can. Like playing with sand.
When my friend really did turn around, it was small and quiet. He was startled, not expecting me.
He muttered my name.
I walked to him, put my arm around his torso, and gently drew him in tight, so that we could feel the warmth of each other’s body heat. Then I let go, put my hands in my pockets shyly, and asked if he was okay.
He shook his head, without explaining any further. I told him his text had made me really worried.
‘I was thinking about the water,’ he said. ‘Did you know I come here a lot? Whenever we fight, or work sucks, or life is generally a bitch, I walk all the way down here just to look at the water.’
He let me look at the water with him for a few seconds. Despite the city lights, the water was a roiling black. A single barge passed under the bridge, and was obscured.
He started speaking again. ‘Every time I’m here, I think about what it would be like to just jump in. About the temperature, or the texture, or even the smell of the water rushing up my nose. Then I think about what would happen if I swam down, and down, and didn’t stop. I picture myself floating steadily deeper, to where no living human has ever gone, among the fish and trash. My hair is waving above my head, my skin is clammy and cold. I’m breathing in and out. I keep going down, for miles, the abyss stretches on as long as I want it to. And that’s where I spend the rest of my life, forever, as I disappear from the rest of the human world.’
I told him it sounded beautiful, but I really hope he didn’t plan to test his imagination.
He chuckled. ‘No…,’ he sighed. He paced away from the edge of the water, and back along the walkway next to the park drive.
‘Well, OK, are you coming then…? It’s going to get cold soon, and I’m not sure it won’t rain. I think I heard you coming from this way…?’
Surprised by his spontaneity, I rushed to lead the way back to my car. I didn’t ask any more questions, letting him talk to me when he needed to. We drove back to my place, and when we arrived inside, I felt a thick, stultifying heat rise to my collar. I was exhausted.
My friend lumbered to the couch. He looked at the pillows for a moment, then looked at me, and said — and this always makes me feel better when I think of this memory — ‘Thanks for coming to find me.’
I nodded, of course, I always would.
He sat down, and rolled prone onto the couch. As I slinked away back to bed with my wife, I’m not sure he wasn’t asleep before I’d even left the room.”
I realized my therapist hadn’t been writing notes for most of the latter half of the story, and was listening intently. When it became evident that that was the end of the memory, he asked, “How is your friend doing now?”
In a soft voice, I matter-of-factly said, “Three years later, he hung himself.”
My therapist took that in, thinking for a minute. Then he asked further, “And you said the water made you think of this memory? What do you think it is about the water in particular that makes you remember it?”
“It’s what my friend talked about,” I proposed. “It’s that image of him drifting forever into the depths. At the time, I couldn’t concentrate on what he was describing, I was too worried about him. But…now I’m also imagining that blackness. The possibility you can always go down. And never have to come up again.”
My throat was suddenly very dry. I reached for the glass of water next to me, but when I grasped the cup, I stopped. The water shook in the glass, forming ghostlike shadows against the walls of the glass.
Far off in the distance, I heard small, muted waves.
